Ahh, Yuffie. Gau and the Mog Squad from VI can only look on in envy at what passes for a missable side character these days.
Fun factoid: If you either don't care or keep picking the wrong prompts, this scene will just keep playing out with her periodically making level jumps to keep up with the party untillevel 42.
Keep out of the forests.
There are even unused fights on the disc where the level 42 version of Yuffie learned kage bunshin and comes in with a clone, or one where Yuffie A hits you from the front and Yuffie B hits you with a back attack like you're Air Buster.
Not that this is a particular challenge at that point in your career, but she does get better items to throw at you. Level 27 Mystery Ninja basically starts wide-casting Bolt, Fire and Ice 3 magic at you.
I already hate this system(...)I just don't really see any chance I might want to engage with the chocobo system once I no longer need to, because this sounds like a giant hassle.
I LOVE the summons, I ADORE watching these devs play around with the new 3D tech, they're one of my favorite bit of 3D spectacle in a game ever. And I will be frank, they only get more self-indulgent from here. The good news is that you can link Elemental materia to them, which is the only way to get certain effects like Holy or Instant-Kill on your attacks.
Yuffie is great, and she's actually a pretty decent character mechanically. I think 7 has probably has my favorite PC ensemble, and a lot of that is purely by virtue of them all being some kind of weirdo or loser or geek. Compare it with, say, 8, where I literally forgot who Rinoa was for over a decade, and I *still* don't remember anyone else but Quistis.
Oh, also forgot. That forest you fought Yuffie traumatised my idiot kid self. Why? Because of these fuckers. They can be brutal if you aren't prepared.
Years later, I'd come back and exact my bloody revenge and find out they're a great grinding encounter, what with the weakness to fire. Also, since they can spawn in groups of five, this means they're a great target for farming the kill counts for getting the second limit break on each level, and they do enough damage they can also be used to build limit breaks to farm the "use a limit break of level X to unlock the next level."
Mechanically she's also one of the possible characters you want for the superbosses in my book. She's one of the three characters who's basic attack can be maxed easily because of the mechanics of her ultimate weapon. Hers is based on the enemies level meaning it will do consistent, high damage against the superbosses. It also apparently ignores the damage penalty for the morph materia, which I did not know.
The other two are Barret (does damage based on AP of equipped materia) and Vincent (does damage based on the number of enemies he's killed (also has the potential for the overflow glitch which turns it into an instant kill)) but both of those require input from the player.
Well, you got the big note on Reunion and enemy name translation right out of the way in your update itself. They get rid of the "Zolom" and just call it Midgardsormr.
Okay, so my first reaction is maniacal laughter. It says I learned it! It says so right there! And, as I have mentioned before, the group being wiped after someone was kicked out doesn't result in a game over, so I don't have to reload anything. By all rights, I should now have the all-powerful Beta spell.
…except I don't. The game's UI just lied to me. I checked the wiki, and an Enemy Skill is learned "whether or not a character survives the attack," and there was no game over, and the game treated me as having learned the skill… But for whatever reason it's not actually retained if we 'die' to the Midgar Zolom.
So, I feel that's pretty bullshit. But also: I now know this big snake has a super-powerful spell I can learn if I just manage to survive the fight properly.
This knowledge will ruin me.
I immediately attempt to obtain knowledge of the spell. In order to do this, I need to survive Beta without it wiping the party, which is hard, because it deals twice as much damage as I have HP. However, that is a Fire-type spell, and I have one Elemental Materia. I have so far exclusively used it to give Cloud's sword elemental typing, but if we slot it into a piece of armor, we can halve damage from a given element.
So, give Tifa the Enemy Skill Materia and an armor with Fire and Elemental slotted in, and let's dive in.
Oh man, you fell into the completionist mindset of having to tank Beta and learn it too, huh. I just looked up a guide for it but you organically discovered the whole strategy.
Like real nuclear weapons, Beta shall become a curse you never wish to use... until you want to use it all the time to the point of triviality and mass death.
This looks to be the granddad and farm owner. He tells us that crossing the marsh isn't safe due to the Midgar Zolom. THANKS, I HADN'T NOTICED. If we want to cross the marsh, we need to move very fast, and for that purpose, we better get a chocobo. If we want to buy one, we should talk to his grandson in the stables.
Sounds straightforward enough! Every game in the past has had chocobo renting be a very simple matter of giving some money and getting a single chocobo ride. Surely this should be the same, right? Right?
(Also we can use his bedroom as an inn for the exorbitant price of 100 gil.)
So, for the farm family, their names are a point of contention between characterization versus puns. In the original Japanese, they were a pun on what they were there to sell/rip you off with. The grandpa Choco Bill was "Gurin", little Choco Billy was "Guringurin", and sister Chole was "Kurin". Reunion... well, this is one case where they're getting really megalomaniacal and trying to create their own localizations: they make them, respectively, Grean, Greene, and Crean.
Honestly, making them sound like rednecks with the country-western sounding names was a better choice. "Choco Bill/Billy" has a goofy charm that goes with several other Choco-puns you can find in the game.
Aerith: "By any chance, are you..?" Rude: "Do you know who I am?" Cloud: "The Turks, right?" (// "Not interested") Rude: "Well if you know, then this won't take long. It's difficult to explain what the Turks do…" Cloud: "Kidnapping, right?" Rude: "To put it negatively… You could say that. But, that's not all there is to it anymore." Rude: "..." Elena: "Sir! It's all right, Rude! I know you don't like speeches, so don't force it!" Rude: "Then explain, Elena." Elena: "I'm the newest member of the Turks, Elena. Thanks to what you did to Reno, we're short-handed." Elena: "...But, because of that, I got promoted to the Turks…" Elena: "Anyhow, our job is to find out where Sephiroth is headed. Wait a minute, it's the other way around… You're the ones that are getting in our way."
At this point, Tseng, the Turk leader, enters stage left.
Tseng: "Elena. You talk too much." Elena: "Mr Tseng!?" Tseng: "No need to tell them about our orders." Elena: "Sorry… Tseng." Tseng: "I thought I gave you orders. Now go. Don't forget to file your report." Elena: "Oh! Right! Very well, Rude and I will go after Sephiroth, who's heading for Junon Harbor!" Tseng: "...Elena. You don't seem to understand." Elena: "Oh! I'm, I'm sorry…" Tseng: "...Go. Don't let Sephiroth get away." Rude/Elena: "Yes sir!" Rude: [Turning around to look at us as he leaves] "Reno said he wanted to see you after the injuries you gave him healed. He wants to show his affection for you all… with a new weapon." Tseng: [Now alone]: "Well, then…" Tseng: "Aerith… Long time no see. Looks like you're safe from the Shinra for a while, now that Sephiroth has reappeared." Aerith: "What are you saying? That I should be grateful to Sephiroth?" Tseng: "No… I won't be seeing much of you, so take care." Aerith: "Strange, hearing that from you." Tseng: "Well then, stay out of Shinra's way."
[He leaves.]
So, not only does Elena have a different name in The Reunion (Yrena) but I've noticed that she comes off a little less... comedic? It's still there, so it might just be a consequence of the wordier and more formally edited dialogue style of the new translation, but she doesn't have the "don't force it!" bit for example. Tseng also comes off as a bit more sincere about wishing Aerith well. I don't know, it's a weird thread to trace in the "are the Turks supposed to be sympathetic or not" thread.
Okay, so, from what I understand Yuffie and everything related to her is going to be a big problem, translation-comparison wise. There's apparently a reputation of the dialogue around her stuff feeling like a rushed translation, like her optional nature made her an afterthought in the process. I don't know, I'll have to see how this compares to what I'm seeing in my Reunion playthrough.
I do really love Yuffie's theme though. It's so goofy you really do get the sense of her as this comic relief character who is completely alien to the main plot and in it for herself.
These mean big bird things are called "Levrikon" here but the Reunion actually follows a canon (Crisis Core) correction to them: "Replicon" which kind of gives me the impression they're either supposed to be some kind of Shinra bioweapon... or maybe an imitative predator to the Chocobos?
There's also a few minor spelling ones in the Grassland Area... "Elfadunk" becomes "Elephadunk", "Mu" becomes "Muu" to better imitate the Japanese reading...
The Mythril Mine gives us a really convoluted one. You may have run into some weird blobby bipedal monsters wielding metal balls on chains, that inflict anger on your party. These guys got translated as "Madouge" in the original but the Reunion has a really bizarre translation note on calling them "Madhu Ju" after "Ju" the Japanese word for curse and a Hindu demon pair called Madhu-Kaitabha.
The poor bastard you're nuking here? In the official translation he is, and must be due to stronger trademark laws, "Hell Rider VR2", but in Japanese it's Hell Harley VR2.
I have no idea why that name wasn't used for the evil motorcycle robots, but it's there and Reunion restores it as a non-profit mod is probably not going to be sued by the Harley-Davidson corporation.
In your grinding for Yuffie, you almost certainly fought a lot of these awful electrical vine creatures called "Capparwire", which I think is a decent pun on copper but which the Reunion seems to think was actually a pun on the Japanese onomatopoeia "kyapa" for spark sounds and thus changes them to the much more bland "Live Wire".
And then there's some weird maybe biblical ones on some minor creatures around the area. A little lizard called a "Nerosuferoth" in the original translation becomes "Nerospheroth" which they claim is an alternate spelling of the same Kabbalistic term that gave Sephiroth his name? Similarly, a big evil owl-looking creature called a "Zemzelett" becomes "Semzealot" because it's been reinterpreted as a reference to the Apostle Simon the Zealot, whose name would be "Semaan" in Aramaic and Arabic.
So uhh... a lot of minor nitpicks introduced here, mainly hunting for references which fan translators see as having been lost in the original's rushed process.
Random minor note but iirc it was originally stated Sephiroth stayed up for three days straight reading everything he found in the basement but in all subsequent retellings of the event it was extended to a full seven. Just so you know how delirious homie must've canonically been.
Wonder if anyone's done a parody where Sephiroth barges into the center of town, makes some dire pronunciation about how he's going to kill everyone, then concludes "after I take a nap", falls down, and starts snoring right there.
Optional: Then Cloud cuts off his head while he's asleep.
Optional optional: He still manages to kill everyone and set the town on fire while headless.
you can spot the times it goes from in-engine cutscene to pre-rendered by the fact that Cloud's weapon swaps to the Buster Sword regardless of what he has equipped.
Which is why you can't sell the Buster Sword (or any of the other characters' starting weapons), a fact which Younger Morgan found inordinately annoying.
I normally like it when games show your equipment changing, but I'm not sure it's a win when they end up going "Oh no, I better get out my CUTSCENE SWORD".
Omi remembering that Yuffie exists but not how to recruit her was just absolutely perfect. Top-tier comedy. My heart sings with joy.
Also you can add "enormous snake lurking below the surface of the swamp that tries to murder you if you cross" to the list of things that scared the shit out of Young Etran when I played this game back in the 90s.
The poor bastard you're nuking here? In the official translation he is, and must be due to stronger trademark laws, "Hell Rider VR2", but in Japanese it's Hell Harley VR2.
I have no idea why that name wasn't used for the evil motorcycle robots, but it's there and Reunion restores it as a non-profit mod is probably not going to be sued by the Harley-Davidson corporation.
This is about where all my memories of FFVII completely stop, right after Giant Bird Place.
I don't think I ever got Beta, but I remember Matra Magic being a pretty good substitute. Don't think I ever got - or even ran into - Yuffie, either. She's definitely a Very Missable character.
The pre-Junon forests are one of the best places in the game to grind limit breaks -- another way to trivialize upcoming segments is to push through to the L3 breaks for Aerith (which also help a great deal against the Zolom).
And we're now up to episode 12 of the Machinabridged! Honestly that also covered the first half of episode 13 as well but that's sort of to be expected with how open the game is. I find it funny that Omi's approach to dealing with the Zolom mirrored the parody fairly closely until the ending.
Okay, they are really flexing their 3D capabilities with that one - and they're doing it with the first summon in the game, which historically has always been kinda lame/ineffective, as a sort of 'foot-in-the-door' advertisement. Previous summons were just "monster appears on the screen, casts a big flashy spell, disappears." This thing is damn near a cutscene unto itself, including a custom summoning stance for the character using it.
For some reason, this particular part was the one that stuck to my mind most strongly when I played this game long ago. Not the Nibelheim flashback, not the Shinra massacre, every time I think of the game impressing into my mind what a mosnter Sephiroth is, that impaled Zolom (Sorm?) is the image that comes up.
Yuffie is the best, in that she is the worst, in that she is the best. I remember being so aggravated by the process of recruiting her that I stuck her in my main party for the rest of the game when possible; Your missable ass is going to contribute to this party no matter what!
Random minor note but iirc it was originally stated Sephiroth stayed up for three days straight reading everything he found in the basement but in all subsequent retellings of the event it was extended to a full seven. Just so you know how delirious homie must've canonically been.
FFVII dev: Staying up for three days straight while staring uninterrupted at small text induces an irresistible urge to KILL. Doesn't matter who, everyone's a target.
Project manager: ...
Dev: ...
Manager: ...
Dev: Just sayin'
…side note: as you can see from this picture, and as is the case for every character and weapon, Cloud's sword has changed from the iconic Buster Sword to the Mythril Sword, which is just, like… A sword.
Which feels weird. The Buster Sword is iconic, all official and fan art of Cloud has him use it that I'm aware of. Like, it's part of the visual identity of Final Fantasy in general and Cloud specifically. The starting screen of the game is literally the Buster Sword planted in the ground against a dark background. Except, mechanically, the Buster Sword is just a starting weapon. It's impressive that it took seven hours for us to outgrow it, to be fair, but now it's completely obsolete, so we'll just equip random weapons instead.
The Remake had this interesting approach where each weapon had its own 'upgrade tree,' so all weapons equippable by a given character were viable, they just have a different focus in terms of abilities and stats. I liked that, though of course this is too complex for VII. And even so - while as a modern AAA games Remake tries to make its gameplay graphics look like its pre-rendered graphics, you can spot the times it goes from in-engine cutscene to pre-rendered by the fact that Cloud's weapon swaps to the Buster Sword regardless of what he has equipped. Advent Children has Cloud wield the Fusion Sword, a special weird sword that splits apart, but importantly in its resting form, it looks just like the Buster Sword.
I remember, years ago, an incredibly obnoxious argument with another player of the TTRPG Exalted, who argued that Artifact weapons (the powerful, legendary weapons wielded by the heroes of the setting, each with their own magical features, kinda like Noble Phantasms) should be treated as perfectly utilitarian items without emotional attachment, to be easily discarded whenever you meet a shinier one. And that idea was anathema to the group of us arguing with him, but in evidence for his point of view, he pointed to FFVII and said "The Buster Sword may be 'iconic' but it's just a weak sword that you discard the moment you find a stronger one," and that conversation has never left my head because yes, he's right in terms of the mechanics of the game, but this here is a total mismatch between a game's mechanics and its visual identity?
I genuinely can't recall if FFVII does anything like this, but I've always enjoyed when an RPG gives you a chance to go back and upgrade that starting iconic weapon to be stronger, whatever the weapon may be. Like Fire Emblem Awakening eventually upgrading the Falchion, or... well, a revealing cut to even mention it, but in MGQ Paradox you can constantly upgrade Luka's starting sword the Custom Sword as you progress through the story, adding not only more attack power but eventually a multitude of extra elements so the blade can automatically hit a lot of enemy weaknesses.
...So, fun fact: I was today years old when I realized it was supposed to be a swimming, underwater giant serpent.
Younger me always assumed like, the shadow was the Midgar Zolom flying up above then divebombing you for the fight, and I've had zero interactions to correct this misconception until now.
Indeed, the character who was blown away from the encounter, Aerith in this case, is at full health, and we simply resume control of our characters on the shore of the swamp. Interesting!
Dang, Aerith been taking lessons from Team Rocket about Blasting Off, managing that landing without even a scratch. Must have been practicing for her original plan to get out of Midgar before the plot caught up with her.
Okay, they are really flexing their 3D capabilities with that one - and they're doing it with the first summon in the game, which historically has always been kinda lame/ineffective, as a sort of 'foot-in-the-door' advertisement. Previous summons were just "monster appears on the screen, casts a big flashy spell, disappears." This thing is damn near a cutscene unto itself, including a custom summoning stance for the character using it.
Capability-wise, Choco/Mog's hits harder than any magic I've unlocked so far, but it seems that it can only be used once a fight - once summoned, the command is greyed out. Final Fantasy VI had a similar thing, but FFVI in general vastly devalued summoning as a tool, whereas here the requirement for materia slot and a dedicated command probably mean it'll have a higher profile? It might be a neat way of balancing out 'summons are flashy enough that they feel like they should be stronger than spells' with 'you can't just make spells worse than summons' by striking a balance where summons are stronger, but more limited than Magic.
Someone else also brought it up, but Summon materia casts work similarly to the All materia: every level they gain, they get another use per battle. So even if you aren't actively using said summons, it can be a good idea to keep it equipped for those levels (of course, this applies to pretty much all materia, and you only have so many slots...)
I understand that the Midgar Zolom here exists as a tutorial, meant to force us to engage with, and learn how to use, that system. And I appreciate that. This kind of forced lesson can be good. I just don't really see any chance I might want to engage with the chocobo system once I no longer need to, because this sounds like a giant hassle.
Full agreement. Outside of some sidequest stuff that'll come up eventually, I don't think I ever bothered to touch Chocobos after Midgar Zolom for the rest of my initial playthrough. It's not like the overworld enemy encounters are all that difficult to deal with anyways - as of yet, you're far from say the lategame Final Fantasy issue of "whoops landed my airship in the wrong continent and got swarmed by T-rex".
Look, Zolom needed to have something up its scales to counteract Shinra and their deathbots encroaching on his damn swamp. So unlike Shrek, he chose the good ol' Cold War option.
Unfortunately for him, Shinra had the Sephiroth option waiting in the wings with the Pointy Tree.
'Beta' is a Fire-type spell, and deals well over a thousand damage to the whole party, instantly wiping them out. There is no recourse to something like this. We're not brute-forcing it.
Okay, so my first reaction is maniacal laughter. It says I learned it! It says so right there! And, as I have mentioned before, the group being wiped after someone was kicked out doesn't result in a game over, so I don't have to reload anything. By all rights, I should now have the all-powerful Beta spell.
…except I don't. The game's UI just lied to me. I checked the wiki, and an Enemy Skill is learned "whether or not a character survives the attack," and there was no game over, and the game treated me as having learned the skill… But for whatever reason it's not actually retained if we 'die' to the Midgar Zolom.
So, I feel that's pretty bullshit. But also: I now know this big snake has a super-powerful spell I can learn if I just manage to survive the fight properly.
And so, it did in fact ruin you later in this same update.
Though I suspect it's going to bring even more ruin to your enemies.
As for the mechanics, my assumption is that the reason you don't learn Beta despite "living" through the fight is that the method you took results in skipping the battle results screen and going straight back to the edge of the swamp. If say, Tifa survived the Beta and you then fled the battle, you might actually learn the spell.
These Turks feel like they wandered in from the reality where the initial plans for them to be a quirky minisquad of likeable punch-clock villains was executed in the first part of the game. Which, to be clear, it wasn't; Original Flavor FF7 has Reno be an asshole poser yakuza goon, Rude just kind of exists, and Tseng is a gloating villain who literally escapes from a scene on a helicopter with a tied up damsel in distress as hostage, and, this must be emphasized, they murdered everyone in Tifa and Barret's town along with their three Avalanche friends.
Yeah it's already come up before, but the Turks really have this feeling of "wait a minute forget that first take" in their characterization. Which I'm not against either choice from "quirky punchclock miniboss squad" or "dastardly, actively monsterous special ops group", but you kind of have to pick a lane and stick with it to get a consistent character. I mean, imagine if the first appearance of Gilgamesh in FFV was him breaking into Galuf's Castle, murdering multiple named characters, and kidnapping Krile. Probably have a slightly different first impression, particularly if this was followed up with completely as usual canon Gil for the rest of the game.
Seriously, the fact that even the naming menu is enough for her to rob you and dip is so great. I love this dumb little teenage ninja girl, I don't think she ever left my party first time I played the game unless it was mandatory.
Don't get me wrong, Beta is pretty nuts and there's some other great Enemy Skills eventually, but FFV gives you just as much if not more versatility and power if you invest in it. Plus, combined with Chemist the "Level X" spells could do absolutely ridiculous things if you kept track of enemy levels.
Don't get me wrong, Beta is pretty nuts and there's some other great Enemy Skills eventually, but FFV gives you just as much if not more versatility and power if you invest in it. Plus, combined with Chemist the "Level X" spells could do absolutely ridiculous things if you kept track of enemy levels.
Hah, yeah that's valid. While there's still a few direct damage options in FFV like the Aero line and Aqua Breath, FFVII is much more straightforward in that regard, with less fiddly special magic bits to deal with. Sure, there's still some oddballs but there's also more options like Beta and Matra Magic.
On the Buster sword being iconic of the character but replaced early on, its not like that's something games have stopped doing. At least he keeps the same iconic outfit, as compared to games like Skyrim with its armor or contemporary Pokemon games with their dress-up where the iconic outfit used in ads and promotions and crossovers and memes and fanart is either early game or starter gear and the player almost inevitably will change their entire appearance by game's end.
On the Buster sword being iconic of the character but replaced early on, its not like that's something games have stopped doing. At least he keeps the same iconic outfit, as compared to games like Skyrim with its armor or contemporary Pokemon games with their dress-up where the iconic outfit used in ads and promotions and crossovers and memes and fanart is either early game or starter gear and the player almost inevitably will change their entire appearance by game's end.
Pokemon is actually a good example of what I mean about there being a tension between mechanics and visual identity, because the games did, extremely quickly (Yellow Version, which is Gen 1) shift to align the game with the very successful anime by having a version of the game where you get a Pikachu as your starter and can't evolve it into a Raichu, then gave it a bunch of new kit to make it slightly more viable as a starter to keep the whole game through. Later games didn't really have the central Pikachu, but they did introduce features meant to make Pikachu at least theoretically viable as a non-evolved Pokemon the whole game through (Lightning Ball!).
That didn't make Pikachu a good Pokemon, or necessarily even competitive (though I'm sure someone with a better grasp on Pokemon's meta history can correct me either way), but there was a deliberate effort to make it so that kid coming in from the marketing where Pikachu was the mascot of the entire series could just grab one of the electric rodents and make it their mainstay without needing to shelve or evolve it.
But yes; overall this issue is not at all uncommon or unique to Final Fantasy, but it's remarkable mostly because it's new. NES/SNES games didn't really have "iconic weapons" in a visual sense, the sprites were too simple, and they weren't really advertised as part of the artwork, except in the Amano concept art.
That didn't make Pikachu a good Pokemon, or necessarily even competitive (though I'm sure someone with a better grasp on Pokemon's meta history can correct me either way)
Yeah, Pikachu's competitive career is still pretty iffy (vid's a little out of date, but I haven't heard anything about Pikachu getting better in Gen 8 onwards, despite getting a Gigantamax form):
Now Pachirisu's competitive career, on the other hand...
Also, fighting nuclear Jormungandr underlevelled in a swamp may be cool, but not as cool as fighting nuclear Jormungandr underlevelled in space is. Meow for anyone who knows what I'm referencing
Interestingly enough, you can never sell or get rid of the Buster Sword. It has to be there, no matter what. Which is a neat way to make sure it's always "present" for a cutscene.
Also, fighting nuclear Jormungandr underlevelled in a swamp may be cool, but not as cool as fighting nuclear Jormungandr underlevelled in space is. Meow for anyone who knows what I'm referencing
